>I also think this is more a problem for non-tech jobs. In today's world, if a software-engineer wanted to travel the world for 8 months I suspect she could easily get a job when she's done.
My sister did just that and landed a job immediately upon returning.
I did the same thing (~2 years), but then it took three months and five rejections (including flying to four offices) before a compatible offer materialized. I was getting worried and kinda running out of money. Whoops.
Three months isn't really that bad. They used to say the rule of thumb was one month for every ten thousand you expect in salary. And that's in a "normal" economy.
I had a long job search once (long story) and what surprised me was that the rejections weren't the biggest confidence killer. Far worse were the lowball offers and too-junior positions that just felt like D+'s. Those were harder to get over.
I can deal with not being hired for lack of fit, but at my age being offered a junior position is an insult. There are plenty of reasons someone might not hire me and many are neutral (position filled, bad day on my end or theirs) but a crappy offer at least feels like a statement.
Ha! I was approached by an in-house recruiter for a startup who advised me to revise my resume. He said that my resume reflected someone with a scientific programming background (the position I was aiming for) as opposed to the dev ops background needed for the low-paid dev ops position they were looking to fill.
Yeah, I was having trouble finding a job in late 2008 when the market got really weird, and a recruiter was the one who clued me in to my resume problems. I'd never really had any trouble finding a job before, so I didn't have a lot of resume-building expertise.
I didn't have resume problems--I had a recruiter call me out of the blue and complain that my resume was for something other that the position he was attempting to fill!
You're right. They discerned ability already present in the more primitive and ancient regions of the brain--for them the capabilities associated with more recent evolutionary developments were a distraction. I was subjected to a surprise quiz, in which one of the answers, dredged from a primal race memory, was "mdadm."
Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly? Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions?
Or am I just assuming programmer, and you're actually something else?
There's junior in social standing and junior in official position.
If you're told your boss manager will be a 23 year old who was BFFs with the founders all growing up, and you are 35 with 15 years of experience, that's kinda degrading.
If you're a 30 year old with 10 years of experience and you're being offered less than what an undergrad gets entreating into facebook or apple or google ($30k sign on, $50k+ worth of 4-year options to start out with (which will easily be added to so you can cash out $500k to $1M within 6-8 years)), that's kinda degrading too.
Sometimes your specific experience doesn't match the outside world anymore. Maybe you have eight years experience using Custom Designed Internal Framework that's of no use to the outside world. So, there you sit, being judged along side people with eight years less experience than you because all your experience is "hidden" to the new company, their interview process, and your social peers.
There are many ways jobs and the interview process can make you feel less than stellar.
Well, the OP seemed to have something specific in mind and I just was wondering what it is.
Of your examples, the one with less money is just less money. I understand issues with a drop in salary, but the reference to "junior position" above seemed to imply more than salary.
On the first, I've been older than my managers for years now. Who cares? I don't want to be a manager, I enjoy programming. I care deeply whether that 23-year-old is a good or bad manager, but that has nothing to do with how old she is.
Less money isn't always less money. I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.
I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.
If you're a professional, your rate is market or pro bono. Anything in-between just gets horrible. Your salary is what it costs the company for management to waste your time. If your salary's low, your time will be wasted.
A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the salary is what it costs to continue doing so. But I would not characterize a salary as the cost of wasting an employee's time--just the cost of their time. But you seem to suggest that ceteris paribus, a market salary is the minimum for which a similarly employed person would be indifferent to being kept idle. Perhaps this holds for a small interval dt. I lack the intuition that employee preference matters.
In the sense of "meaning of life stuff" (fulfillment, meaning, purpose, etc). Your salary is what you charge someone to make you do things you wouldn't normally do. Sometimes, especially in "tech," jobs and natural interests align. In the normal world, that isn't always so.
If that 23 Year old is one of the first engineers and built much of the system then yes, you are going to be junior to them no way around that they most likely earned their spot working crazy hours when the company could barely be called one. There are two sides to every coin, if you want to avoid that then look to join really early companies and be the one that earns the spot by building the system.
Junior Position is a euphemism for "job that's not going to pay market rates". My experience in tech is that most true "junior" roles are covered by internships...
I think that getting a good junior engineer experience is rare and hard unless you start and land in the exact right place. If you attend Stanford or Harvard and your CS professor is a friend of someone VP-level in your company, then you'll still be "junior"-- at market-fair entry-level rates-- but you're going to be groomed to grow quickly and have a lot of freedom to travel the organization as you look for a fit that matches your talents and will enable you to rise quickly. If you're anyone else, your junior programmer years are every-person-for-him/herself and unless you fight hard (and job hop) you will get stuck doing the dreck that no one wants to do, that you don't learn from, and that shits all over your career.
At Google, if you attended Stanford and landed in the Mt. View office (the office being more important than the school) there was, even when I was there, a decent chance of getting a legit SWE-2/SWE-3 experience that would train you to make more of yourself, and make promotions (up to Staff) basically ensured so you could focus your energy on actually learning and becoming a great engineer.
Yeah, I agree with you. My career started at MSFT long ago and gained good experience quickly...so if you happen to land at a top tech company, you'll get the right experience. I think this goes for almost any high-end career, too.
But as it is now, I see a lot of companies seeking Junior-level positions, but with big expectations and knowledge requirements. Everything except wanting to pay a proper salary.
Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly?
I'm 30 with 7 years of experience. I wouldn't say I'm a top-1% programmer (probably top 5%, possibly 2%) yet but I'm a really good data scientist and I've seen a lot of different corporate environments. Also, being a Lisper (but also knowing well the virtue of static typing, having worked on production Ocaml systems) I have good taste. There are still some holes in my knowledge (I was a math major, not CS) but I'm filling them pretty quick.
I wouldn't take a job where my day consists of being handed bugs or small features in some large project where the decisions were already made. Someone else can churn tickets, I'm past that point in my career. I'm not a prima donna. In the short term (say, two weeks) I'll do what is required no matter how unglamorous. But in the long term (3+ months) I'm not going to work in a role that's incoherent with my career objectives.
I only work in roles where I get to make some of the technical decisions, because if I'm purely in an implementation role, I won't learn anything. I generate ideas and implement them; if I'm only doing the second of these, then the work is meaningless to me. If the project is big and complicated-- say, 2.1 to 2.3 in difficulty on this scale: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... I'd probably be doing that under light supervision and that's fine, but if I'm not engaging in a learning process and in control of what I work on, then I'm wasting my time at this age.
Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions?
Senior programming is different from junior programming. As with writing, there are varying forms of it and they have different flavors that might not be obvious to those who don't do it on a daily basis.
A junior programmer fixes bugs and implements features that come downstream from executives, product management, and more senior programmers. There's a lot of value in that experience, if it comes with mentorship, when you're starting out. But when you get to my level, the quickest way to learn is to do things and find out directly what works and what doesn't.
A senior programmer gets to set priorities, generally has a lot of autonomy over what he works on, and has input (and, often, final say) in product and architectural decisions.
It's not about title, as it were. There are plenty of people with "Senior" in their title who are junior in terms of how they work, and there are others without fancy titles who are de facto senior.
But, you know, in context, there's a huge difference between not finding a job and not being able to easily make the next step up in your career.
At 7 years, you just don't have much senior experience (that's a comment about years, not knowledge or talent). 7 years is a lot of programming experience, it's just not a lot of senior dev or team lead experience.
It's a good career move to insist on this in your next position, and I'm not doubting that you're capable of it, but that puts you in a completely different category than somebody who can't find work at all or somebody who's been a senior dev for 20 years and can't find a position.
One thing to be aware of is that a lot of shops, myself included, almost never hire senior/leads directly. I'll pay your salary request, but no matter who you are, you're going to spend a couple of months on somebody else's project before you lead your own, just to understand the code base, the team, the tracking and VCS systems, the culture in general. We may have an understanding that you'll lead the next big project if you don't flame out, but you're still going to have to spend some time down in the code trenches.
it's just not a lot of senior dev or team lead experience.
In the traditional world, yes. But what about our wacky tech world where the 22 year old is a founder/ceo/manager of the entire company? Are you less experienced and knowledgeable that that person?
I agree with your part about not hiring externally for new internal projects though (unless all your other internal projects are horrible and you need new blood to get out of institutional brain damage).
To extend your "insult of being offered a junior position" line, sometimes engineering interviews will test for willingness to leave or bouncing aroundy-ness. But it's always a losing game if you're a candidate over 40, ISTM, because even if you are just fine with a junior position and eager to accept their offer and get to work, they often perceive you as someone who will bounce as soon as a better offer comes along (and of course, if you're not fine being a junior just to get back in the game you wouldn't be talking to them).
My sister did just that and landed a job immediately upon returning.